Carolee Schneemann: 'I never thought I was shocking'

The avant-garde artist who bared her buttocks for Yoko Ono, filmed herself having sex when movies still couldn't say the word 'vagina', and made art out of meat long before Lady Gaga talks to Steve Rose as her first solo UK show opens

In 1968, Carolee Schneemann caused outrage in Britain simply by giving a talk about art. "I wore farmers overalls," she says, "and I had lots of oranges stuffed everywhere. It was about Cézanne, so I showed slides and talked about his influence – and I kept undressing and dressing. I was naked under my overalls and I'd throw these oranges into the audience, like a still life escaping. Then I'd do my overalls back up and continue the lecture."

The audience, at the ICA in London, did not appreciate the 29-year-old artist's approach. "They went a bit nuts," Schneemann recalls. "They were outraged, 'This is infuriating! What does this mean? How can she be naked and talk about art history?' But that was the point."

If the point no longer needs making, it's thanks to people like Schneemann. The artist, now 73, has spent her life smashing taboos and shocking audiences. She was at the forefront of movements that only later came to be known as body art, performance art and feminist art, paving the way for the likes of Marina Abramović, Cindy Sherman, Tracey Emin – and even Lady Gaga. "My work became a bridge that had to be crossed by young feminists working with their bodies," she says.

Now, almost five decades on, Britain may be ready for her. The American's first solo show in the UK has just opened in London: an exhibition revisiting her 1966 work Water Light/Water Needle. Re-created via films, sketches and painted photographs, it's a playful piece in which performers spin and dance like trapeze artists on ropes strung high across a church hall in New York. It was inspired by her first trip to Venice in 1965: she was struck by the balance between the sky and the water, the pervading sensation of floating. And just in case anyone thought she was losing her edge, she followed this with Viet Flakes, a collage of Vietnam war atrocities. "My works go from ecstatic pleasure to rage and fury," she says.

Schneemann wanted to be an artist before she even knew what an artist was, but her gender sent her down a very different career path. "I was always discouraged," she says. "Even when I had a fellowship for painting, some of my teachers were very hostile. 'You're taking this too seriously. You're only a girl. Don't set your heart on art.' My boyfriends in college stole my brushes and my books, like, 'We need this more than you do.'"

In the vibrant, male-dominated art world of New York in the early 1960s, Schneemann seems to have known everyone. She worked with the Fluxus group and considers Yoko Ono a soulmate (Schneemann's is one of the bottoms in Ono's infamous film Four, comprised entirely of naked buttocks); she participated in performance works by Claes Oldenberg and Robert Morris (invariably naked); she hung out with Andy Warhol's Factory crowd ("they were just so doped up, so gaily involved in each other, though Andy was weirdly adorable"); she associated with the likes of John Cage, Philip Glass and Robert Rauschenberg, not to mention experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage, who became a close friend. It was an idyllic existence for an artist: she and her composer partner James Tenney oscillated between a loft in Manhattan and a country home upstate. She would be painting and collaging with the dissonant chords of Tenney's music coming through the wall.

'A huge wall of taboo remains' … a performance of Schneemann's Meat Joy. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

Schneemann struggled to be taken seriously as an artist by her male associates, though. She later wrote that she felt like the "cunt mascot on the men's art team". Brakhage, arbiter of the city's avant-garde scene, told her: "Your films aren't really films." Hence her decision to break out of painting – by stepping right into it. In 1963, Schneemann produced a series called Eye Body, in which she incorporated her own naked, paint-smeared body into tableaux she created out of painted panels, broken mirrors, old umbrellas and toy snakes. The images are confrontational, primal, unashamedly erotic, far from passive.

"I called it being the image and the image-maker," Schneemann says. "The female nude is part of a revered tradition, although she is not to take authority over depictions of her nudity. She is just to be available." In censorious 1960s America, though, the reaction to Eye Body was predictably hostile. "I thought it would be seen as an integrated, powerful event. It wasn't. It was taken as narcissism and self-indulgence by the critics. They said, 'If you want to paint, put your clothes back on.' It's always been like that."

Schneemann didn't put her clothes back on. Pop art and minimalism were beginning to take hold: the trend was for cool, detached, hygienic art. But trends didn't bother Schneemann, who went in the opposite direction. In pop art, she explains, "the female nude was painted like an automobile. Mechanised. There's no lubricity, no fleshiness. It's a very cool position – still empowering male representation. Pop and commercialism seem as if they were meant for each other. Andy [Warhol] welcomed everything, socialites, arms dealers. I started out as a landscape painter. That's much more my sensibility."

Well, after a fashion. In 1964, Schneemann began making Fuses, a film that explicitly showed Tenney and her having sex. She painstakingly etched, coloured and reassembled its frames to form a joyous collage, aiming to capture the equitable, erotic splendour of everyday sex "with shameless regard". This was at a time when movies couldn't show pubic hair or even say the word "vagina". Schneemann had to get the footage developed in a secret lab usually used for pornographic films. Although it was far too risqué for wide exhibition, it did win a prize at Cannes in 1969.

Her most famous work, though, is Meat Joy, in which four men and four women perform choreographed actions to music in their underwear, then end up writhing on the floor in a heap, covered in paint and scraps of paper, cavorting with raw sausages, chicken and fish. Schneeman first performed this "ecstatic group ritual" in Paris, then took it to London and New York. The different reactions were revealing. In Paris, the performance was attended by Man Ray and Eugène Ionesco and was, she recalls, "fabulous, ecstatic, transformative – no one had seen anything like it. They were a brilliant audience." One spectator got so carried away, however, that he leapt in and tried to strangle Schneemann.

In New York, responses were energetic, even when critical. London, however, was "a nightmare": the audience was unresponsive and disapproving. Then one of her chickens got stuck in a sink, causing a flood of bloody water. "The performance was derelict. It was inane. My leading guy was completely drunk on beer and couldn't walk properly. London was the worst."

But this didn't stop her returning to live in London in the 1970s; nor did her confrontational works peter out. In 1975, she performed another infamous piece, Interior Scroll, which culminated in Schneemann standing naked on a table and removing a long strip of paper from inside her vagina, from which she read out an imaginary conversation with a dismissive male film-maker. "I never thought I was shocking," she says. "I say this all the time and it sounds disingenuous, but I always thought, 'This is something they need. My culture is going to recognise it's missing something.'"

But times have changed. "Feminist analysis and feminist context for work has completely changed. We have a living history now and it's inclusive. It even goes back to the paleolithic," she says, gleefully citing a recent study that proved that most of the handprints in ancient cave paintings were women's. "We knew that all along," she smiles. What's more, artists like Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas – in many ways Schneemann's successors – are recognised and commercially successful. Schneemann was never rich but now she is at least respected. Her work is undergoing a critical reappraisal, now that it's possible to see and show it without fear of prosecution.

Her challenge now is to escape the legacy of "the goddam 70s". But then Schneemann's life (she refuses to call it a career) has been one long struggle against barriers. Ageism is just one more hurdle. "I have no control over that. I'm always hopeful my audience will grow with me. I just keep working."

• Water Light/Water Needle is at the Hales Gallery, London E1, until 12 April. Details: 020-7033 1938; halesgallery.com